CW: none.

I wanted to paint an eerie portrait of the Brooklyn Bridge area as I first experienced it, capturing both a feeling of wonder and unease, for any place with enough character and history can feel like it has an undercurrent of old magic that may ensnare you. Plus, I was a teenager going off to university, taking in an unfamiliar city for the first time on my own, so each new experience seemed larger than life, magnifying the delightful and the spooky such that the real and gritty began to feel surreal. And Brooklyn did indeed ensnare me, because I later ended up living there for over five years!

—IL

“Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn’t happen.”

—Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

You’re lured under a towering stone bridge with promises
of brick oven pizza, swirls of hand-whipped gelato,
a carousel with painted horses frozen in exultation,

but when you taste fiery specks of ancient sorcery
in decadent bites of char-dusted crust, sparking visions
of Grimaldi’s and Juliana’s everlasting duel,

you venture to the river to cool down, seizing two scoops
of milky stracciatella in a jewel-encrusted cone
and letting its icy fingers creep down your throat

as you stare at stone-faced children
spinning at frightening speed atop chimeric horses
skewered on wrought-iron poles, chanting,

hastening the oncoming dusk as crackling pillars of light
erupt beneath them, beaten back by inkblot clouds closing ranks—
it’s time to bid goodbye before you’re ensnared too.

You resist the allure of a beckoning diner’s lipstick-red booths,
decline a ghostly yellow cab’s insistent whistle,
yet you follow a foghorn siren call onto a forlorn ferry.

A soaring skyline twinkles in your dusky eyes,
which engorge like sullen moons when the last ferry of the day
loops back to the port under the bridge in a wide, smiling arc—
Brooklyn’s not ready for you to depart yet.